scientific writing

Update: Thanks for all the comments about this post on HackerNews, and especially for all the kind words about Overleaf. One commenter suggested I could make more prominent the link to our recent announcement about ShareLaTeX joining Overleaf, so here it is 🙂

About five years ago John Lees-Miller and I had a trip to forget to San Francisco. We had made it through to the interview stage at YC with our collaborative writing platform, called WriteLaTeX.

TL;DR – Things didn’t go well in the interview, but we pressed on regardless and today have a successful, investor-backed business that now serves over two million users worldwide.

If you have similar / different stories of how you got started, feel free to post them in the comments here or on the blog post linked above. If you’re in London on the 25th September and are working in the science / research / publishing space, you should definitely come to our next #FuturePub event that evening.

We still have some speaking slots available if you fancy giving a lightning talk — just let me know 🙂

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Whilst browsing the writeLaTeX twitter feed the other day, I came across an interesting observation that the absence of TeX is a good indicator that a math paper has issues, highlighted by John Cook (@TeXtip) in this tweet:

In the original blog post on this (entitled ‘Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong’), this is only one of a number of points made, although it is the first, and is accompanied by the interesting statistic that:

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Most of the world’s technological and medical innovations began with a scientific paper — there are now over two million scientific papers published every year, and many more technical reports and presentations. As scientists, we spend a lot of time writing, reviewing and publishing these papers, and whilst the Internet has drastically improved how they’re published and distributed, writing (and collaborating) is still difficult. With WriteLaTeX we’re helping to change that.

WriteLaTeX is a real-time collaborative writing platform which lets you create, edit & share your scientific ideas easily online using LaTeX, a powerful tool for scientific publishing. My co-founder John Lees-Miller created writeLaTeX to address the problems we experienced ourselves when writing papers collaboratively, in particular in the fields of mathematics, physics and computer science. We both have backgrounds in mathematics so naturally used LaTeX but when working with co-authors in different countries and different disciplines, there was no easy solution – so John created one!